What the NHL Lockout Reveals About Capital and Labor

&#62;<i>"The NFL has managed this shift quite remarkably, in a fashion that has gotten them so that virtually very team is profitable"</i><p>Professional football's labor economics are radically different from other sports. They have virtually no development costs associated with talent - development of talent is largely done by universities (many tax supported).<p>In addition the market value of players is based upon barter - trades typically don't involve transfer fees, they involve other players sometimes and usually involve draft picks.<p>Draft picks are interesting because high round picks are associated with a greater out of pocket expense for the team receiving them should they choose to exercise the pick - i.e. the signing bonus and salary of the first overall pick are substantial outlays, whereas a second round pick will involve less money.

This really isn't much more than a fluff piece giving an excuse for bad management.<p>It ignores many of the detailed issues and instead makes it entirely about overall revenue using unsourced and likely made up numbers. Missing was any reference to revenue sharing and fact that some teams are turning large profits while others are losing money year after year, but the league insists on keeping teams in unsuccessful locations. The Phoenix Coyotes are a great example of this full of bad business decisions from the start, and only got worse when Jim Balsillie got involved. This shows little evidence of a successful long term plan.<p>I am not a fan on unions in general, but I see this as a typical issue with American business. Bad decisions are made and instead of management taking responsibility, the blame is simply put onto labour costs, wages are pushed down and the same mistakes happen again.

The title was the best part of this piece. It included hardly any details and doesn't even come to a conclusion about what was revealed other than that the owners have more money than the players (and that the NFL has more money than the NHL).<p>At minimum it should have discussed what the issues both parties disagreed with. For starters, it wasn't that the owners "still think they deserve to make an attractive profit on this game".

This article seems poorly researched and poorly reasoned. Most observers are crediting the end of the lockout not to "the players realizing the owners were willing to scuttle the season", but instead to the players having voted to authorize the NHLPA to disclaim their representation of the players, effectively removing the players from the union, thereby opening the owners up to anti-trust lawsuits.<p>Only once the NHLPA took that step did the league seem to start negotiating in earnest, having previously pursued a strategy they hoped would break the union as it did during the previous lockout.<p>It's essentially the same tactic that ended the NBA lockout.

Bettman is undeniably an awful commissioner. He was instrumental in forcing the expansion that created the teams that can't make a profit. He has been the driving force for 3 lockouts now.<p>It's a fault of management, not a fault of the players who have given up ground in each lockout. The leafs are a billion dollar team, the coyotes are worth almost nothing. Cutting player costs by a few million per year wont change this dynamic.

What I find incredibly interesting about sports "unions" is that the unions use the threat of disbanding as a labour tactic. In every other industry, if the labour union even hinted at disbanding, the owners would ask "How can we help you along?" In North American sports leagues, the owners fight it.<p>You have to wonder exactly who is benefiting from Players Associations?

Strikes would not happen if US sports leagues were based around free market principles rather than monopolies that set artificial restrictions on athletes salaries and conditions.